A couple of months ago, I wrote about 10 little wooden gold frames that we bought at a tag sale for a dollar the entire lot. They’re beautiful, made in Mexico, and have a standard 5″ x 7″ image area. I pondered about what I would do with them, since they had been sitting in my studio for close to two years.

I finally found a use for a few of them. As one of the exhibiting artists in Gallery 99, a temporary art gallery where all art is for sale at $99, I had to find a creative solution to the challenge of presenting my art for sale at such an affordable price. I am painting small vignettes of lake scenes in acrylic on 5″ x 7″ gessoed masonite and placing those into the dime-a-piece frames. The paintings only take me about 4 hours to complete. Between materials and labor, offering these pieces for sale at $99 each will actually work.

The other 14 artists in the show each have found ways to sell art for $99 or less, whether it’s to offer work unframed (which is allowable in this exhibit), prints of originals, explorations in different mediums, or just work that has been hanging out in the studio for awhile, not shown. You never know who it might appeal to, so it’s a good idea to pull some of the older stuff out and expose it to a new audience.